French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday said defence ties with India had reached a new high after the two nations signed a key security accord for the Indian Ocean to counter China's growing influence in the region. "Defence cooperation between the two countries now has a new significance," Macron said as a gushing Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood by his side. Under the deal, India and France will open their naval bases to warships from each other, a move seen as an attempt to undermine China's territorial ambitions. "A strong part of our security and the world's stability is at...

BEIJING — China has waded into a growing political crisis involving the small island nation of Maldives, urging the international community to play what it calls a "constructive role" in the ongoing dispute, putting itself at odds with the United Nations on the issue. The Maldives, which is known more for its luxury resorts, has become an increasingly important part of China's global trade and infrastructure project, the "Belt and Road" initiative. It is also seen by analysts as a key strategic outpost in the Indian Ocean, despite its close proximity to India. Earlier this month, Maldives President Abdulla Yameen...

US-based company Ocean Infinity dispatched a search vessel this past week to look in the southern Indian Ocean for debris from the plane. "The basis of the offer from Ocean Infinity is based on 'no cure, no fee,'" Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said on Saturday, meaning payment will be made only if the company finds the wreckage. "That means they are willing to search the area of 25,000 square kilometres pointed out by the expert group near the Australian waters. I don't want to give too much hope ... to the [next of kin]," he added. Ocean Infinity...

Alarmist scientists have been caught red-handed tampering with raw data in order to exaggerate sea level rise.The raw (unadjusted) data from three Indian Ocean gauges – Aden, Karachi and Mumbai – showed that local sea level trends in the last 140 years had been very gently rising, neutral or negative (ie sea levels had fallen). But after the evidence had been adjusted by tidal records gatekeepers at the global databank Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) it suddenly showed a sharp and dramatic rise.The whistle was blown by two Australian scientists Dr. Albert Parker and Dr. Clifford Ollier in a paper for Earth Systems and Environment.

Doklam standoff: Countering China in the backyard, Indian Navy silently tightens grip over Indian Ocean New Delhi has tasked the Indian Navy to silently spread its influence and further strengthen its grip over the Indian Ocean Region. Sudhi Ranjan Sen | Posted by Bijin Jose New Delhi, August 24, 2017 | UPDATED 15:11 IST As countries like Bangladesh, Myanmar, Vietnam and Thailand keenly watch the outcome of the standoff at the Doklam in Bhutan between the Indian and Chinese armies; New Delhi has tasked the Indian Navy to silently spread its influence and further strengthen its grip over the Indian...

he United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladi­mir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials. The meeting took place around Jan. 11 — nine days before Trump’s inauguration — in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, officials said. Though the full agenda remains unclear, the UAE agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with...

A remote part of the Indian Ocean has become, by chance, one of the best-mapped parts of the underwater world. The ocean is vast, deep, and unexplored. When Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared three years ago this week, the search brought the ocean’s vastness into sharp relief. This is how deep and dark it is three miles down. This is how unlikely you are to spot a downed airliner in 120,000 square nautical miles of open ocean. This is how much we know about the ocean floor—less than we know about the surface of Mars. As the search dragged on...

<p>China is set to install "a few thousand" troops and staff at its first ever overseas military base, the first permanent overseas deployment by Chinese armed forces.</p>
<p>The new naval facility will sit in the same city as America's own sprawling African military headquarters in Djibouti, the Horn of Africa country where the US has a 4,500-strong base running counter-terrorism operations across the region. Japan, which also has its only overseas military base in Djibouti, already faces a tense stand-off with China over territorial disputes in the South China Sea.</p>

The earthquake that struck the Indian Ocean on December 26, triggering a series of huge waves called tsunami, "was possibly" caused by an Indian nuclear experiment in which "Israeli and American nuclear experts participated," an Egyptian weekly magazine reported Thursday. According to Al-Osboa', India, in its heated nuclear race with Pakistan, has lately received sophisticated nuclear know-how from the United States and Israel, both of which "showed readiness to cooperate with India in experiments to exterminate humankind." Since 1992, the magazine argued, leading geological centers in Britain, Turkey and other countries, warned of the need "not to hold nuclear experiments...

PERTH, Australia (CBS News/CBSDC/AP) — A Thai satellite has detected about 300 objects near the search area for the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner, officials in Bangkok said Thursday, but there was little chance of getting human eyes across those items in the near term as weather again forced officials to halt the search for debris by air. Anond Snidvongs, director of Thailand’s space technology development agency, said Thursday the images showed “300 objects of various sizes” in the southern Indian Ocean about 1,675 miles southwest of Perth. He said the images were taken by the Thaichote satellite on Monday, took...

(Poster's note: I searched by title and keyword and didn't find this already on FR) A pilot from New York believes he has found the wreckage of the missing Malaysia Airline Flight 370 off the coast of Thailand after searching thousands of satellite images online. Michael Hoebel, 60, spent hours trawling through the images made available to the public on a crowd-sourcing website, TomNod.com, before coming across what he believes is the doomed plane. The recreational pilot from Tonawanda said he was shocked to discover that the aircraft, which vanished two months ago, appeared to be in one piece beneath...

British woman Katherine Tee is saying she spotted what she believes is the missing Malaysian Air flight MH370 while she was sailing. She saw in early March, but is only now coming forward because she did not believe her eyes at the time. Tee said that while she and her husband Marc Horn were sailing across the Indian Ocean from India to Thailand, she spotted what looked like a plane on fire during the night of March 7. She thought she was hallucinating, but after the media coverage, she looked up the flight plan of the aircraft and discovered their...

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was "highly likely" on autopilot when it ran out of fuel and crashed into the Indian Ocean, Australian researchers have said. A new search area for the missing Boeing 777 plane has been announced by the Australian government .... Deputy Prime Minister Warren Trust confirmed the search will move further south to an area 1,800km (1,100 miles) off the western coast of Australia.... An expert group has reviewed the existing information on MH370, revealing that is it probable that the plane was on autopilot when it ended its flight. Truss said it was "highly, highly likely...

'U.S. military shot down MH370 because they thought it had been hacked and was about to be used in terror attack', claims former airline boss Marc Dugain says U.S. Navy in Indian Ocean attacked the plane He claims that islanders saw the plane fly close to a U.S. base Also alleges that a spy told him to back away from his probe into MH370 A former airline boss and writer claims the U.S. downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 because the military feared it had been taken over by hackers and was about to be used in a 9/11-style attack. Marc...

A second senior airline industry source has revealed his belief that there is some sort of conspiracy behind the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. As The Herald Sun reports, Emirates president and CEO Sir Tim Clark made world headlines in October when he revealed his doubts about the fate of the missing plane, which disappeared early in the morning of March 8 this year. Now a second senior airline industry source has voiced his doubts about the fate of the plane, with the even wilder claim that the Boeing 777 may have been shot down by US military personnel...

Was Flight MH370 captured by aliens? Stolen by Israeli agents? Or did it crash in Ukraine? A round-up of the best conspiracy theories LAST UPDATED AT 12:06 ON Thu 4 Dec 2014 See related: Flight MH17: new footage shows aftermath of crash – video MH370: search for missing plane could be over by May The mystery of flight MH370: 7 other planes that vanished In the ongoing absence of firm evidence about the fate of missing flight MH370, the world's conspiracy theorists have weighed in with explanations of their own for the disappearance of the Malaysia Airways plane.The susbsequent...

Searchers Focus on April 5 Signals as Confidence Fades Over April 8 Detections Searchers preparing to resume the underwater hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 increasingly suspect that some of the electronic signals detected last month didn't come from the jetliner's black-box flight recorders, a senior Australian naval officer said. The doubts—based on further acoustic analysis of the transmissions by Australian authorities over recent weeks—represent another potential setback in the two-month-old operation. An initial underwater search in the southern Indian Ocean has already failed to find any sign of the missing plane, while a costly air-and-ship search of the ocean's...

The search for a missing Malaysia Airlines MASM.KL jetliner suffered a further setback on Thursday after Australian officials said wreckage from the aircraft was not on the seabed in the area they had identified.... The search was narrowed last month after a series of acoustic pings thought to be from the plane's black box recorders were heard near where analysis of satellite data put its last location, some 1,600 km (1,000 miles) off the northwest coast of Australia. "The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has advised that the search in the vicinity of the acoustic detections can now be considered...

(CNN) -- The four acoustic pings at the center of the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 for the past seven weeks are no longer believed to have come from the plane's black boxes, a U.S. Navy official told CNN. The acknowledgment came Wednesday as searchers wrapped up the first phase of their effort, having scanned 329 square miles of southern Indian Ocean floor without finding any wreckage from the Boeing 777-200.